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Comment by kjs3 | Hacker News Reader

You might have done barely working duck-taped Bash scripts; not eveyone who calls themself a 'system admin' is competent. But actual professionals who ran these systems since the 1970s had carefully written, fully functional scripts and we were quite capable of keeping hundreds and thousands of servers running just fine. Being bad at your job isn't the tools fault.

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All Bash scripts are duck-taped by definition. It's a shitty duck-tape language.

> thousands of servers running just fine

Err yeah well you might have noticed these things called "laptops" and "desktops". SysVinit was... fine.. on servers. It worked badly on desktops and not really at all on laptops. I'm pretty sure the post introducing SystemD explained it all in detail if you want to learn something.

Bash doesn’t just stop working because the x86 CPU is inside a different form factor. And actually Linux (and BSD too) did used to run on commodity desktop for local ISPs, newsgroups and so on and so forth. That was part of the reason for their success story: Linux and FreeBSD meant smaller Internet-facing business in the late 90s didn’t have to buy expensive mainframe hardware to run Unix software.

The issue with Linux on the desktop, and especially the laptop, in the pre-systemd days wasn’t the init system. It was the lack of quality drivers.

Now I’m not saying that systemd hasn’t brought improvements over sysv. But to say bash worked badly on laptops but fine on servers is just silly. That’s simply not how the technology works at all.

And I don’t need to read some promotional piece from Redhat to know this. I’ve been running Linux on desktops and laptops longer than many adults have been alive. So I’ve lived through these massive ecosystem changes and have a first hand account of life before systemd.

Actually yes, that's why they did stop working. Laptops regularly change hardware configuration. Desktops less so. Back when "local ISPs, newsgroups and so on and so forth" had desktops, they never changed hardware configuration while running.

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